Au­to­mate tasks in Work­flow

The more you use iOS 8 and an iPhone, the more you re­alise how, re­ally, you’ve got a per­sonal com­puter in your pocket.

The only thing miss­ing from iOS has been pro­gram­ming and au­to­ma­tion – un­til now. Work­flow (£2.49 as we write) fixes that by bring­ing a Mac-like Au­toma­tor tool to the iOS plat­form.

Work­flow is a clever app that in­te­grates with other apps such as Cal­en­dar, Con­tacts, Mu­sic, Pho­tos and Videos, and can cre­ate PDF doc­u­ments, share items on so­cial me­dia, save files to Drop­box and a huge range of other tasks. Th­ese work­flows can be run from within the Work­flow app, or turned into ex­ten­sions and ac­cessed through the Run Work­flow op­tion in the Share menu. Work­flow is such a ver­sa­tile app that you may be at a loss with what to do at first, but there are nu­mer­ous ex­am­ples to help you get started.

Here we’re go­ing to show you how to browse ac­tions and turn them into a work­flow you can run. We’ll then look at find­ing ex­am­ples from the Gallery be­fore cre­at­ing an ex­ten­sion that turns web pages into PDFs and saves them to Drop­box. We’ll then sub­mit this work­flow to the Gallery for other users to find. Let’s go! Lucy Hat­ter­s­ley

The only thing miss­ing from iOS was pro­gram­ming and au­to­ma­tion – un­til now